Newly Released Books

Deep secrets abound in this month’s books: A boy living off the grid in Montana reveals his family’s chilling history, an artist driven to violence tries to cover his tracks, a woman on a British island remembers what caused her to flee her home in Australia, and a soldier helps a captain prepare for a covert mission.

“The Shelf” is evidence that a companionable writer can get away with almost any excuse to write a book. Phyllis Rose, best known for a biography of Virginia Woolf (“Woman of Letters”) and “Parallel Lives,” about the marriages of five Victorian writers, here turns her critical acumen and conversational tone to a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of books at an Upper East Side library. Her goal is to free herself from the “famous and canonical” and “sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature.” The resulting reader’s diary includes time with Gaston Leroux’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” the 18th-century French picaresque “Gil Blas” and Mikhail Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time.” (Of her experience with the last, Ms. Rose writes, “A novel can improve when the moment-by-moment distraction of actually reading it is in the past.”) She tracks down the novelist Rhoda Lerman, one of her discoveries, and strikes up a friendship. Readers of “The Shelf” will feel befriended as well.

THE PAINTERBy Peter Heller364 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

The 45-year-old painter Jim Stegner, the title character of Peter Heller’s second novel, is a Renaissance man of the American West. He reads T. S. Eliot and listens to Tom Waits. He knows his fine art, but he’s equally at home standing in a river, “facing off with a bunch of wary fish who may or may not be smarter than me.” He also has a bad habit, when his temper flares, of shooting at people and braining them with rocks. (“I felt so gentle most of the time,” he says. “I really did. I swear.”) Jim’s life changes decisively when he comes upon a blustery stranger abusing a small horse. Suspenseful scenes with the local authorities and vigilantes of various stripes propel the novel. Mr. Heller’s first three books were nonfiction chronicles of water-based adventures (surfing, saving whales, “extreme kayaking”), and his close attention to the natural world serves his fiction well. The Colorado and New Mexico landscapes evoked in “The Painter” give the novel a deeper than usual sense of place.

ALL THE BIRDS, SINGINGBy Evie Wyld231 pages. Pantheon. $24.95.

At the start of Evie Wyld’s second novel, Jake Whyte is living in chosen isolation on a British island, and someone or something has violently killed two of her sheep. While trying to figure out that present-day mystery, she tantalizes the reader with hints about her deeper past and why she fled her home in Australia. Flashbacks cover her time toiling as the only woman in a sheepshearing operation, desperate days she spent working as a prostitute and a time she was held captive on a farm by a man named Otto. Jake’s no-nonsense demeanor (her dog is named Dog) mirrors the unforgiving land. The prose maintains a fine-tuned ominous mood, but the most impressive aspect of the novel is its structure. The story of Jake’s past life is told in reverse, in perfectly parceled episodes, and just when it seems we’ve reached the foundational trauma, we’re pulled further back into the unsettling past.

The woman at the center of Valeria Luiselli’s lovely and eccentric first novel is trying to write a novel. Unsatisfied in her marriage and feeling suffocated by her two young children (“They don’t let me breathe. Everything I write is — has to be — in short bursts. I’m short of breath.”), she visits graveyards for peace and quiet. “In a way, I was living in a perpetual state of communion with the dead.” When she begins thinking about the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, Owen — or his ghost? — begins narrating parts of the book. The novel, composed of brief sections, has a philosophical, aphoristic air: “In the logic of the sick person, of the idiot, the mad, everything is about to fall into place.” It’s also peppered with arresting imagery: One of a blind man’s eyes is described as immobile; the other rolls in its socket “like one of those doves trapped inside a church or railway station, beating its wings against a high, closed window.”

FOURTH OF JULY CREEKBy Smith Henderson470 pages. Ecco. $26.99.

In 1980, rural Montana is a place where “nurturing a child’s intelligence was still considered a bit indulgent — the sooner they got to work, the better,” and where locals distrust government. (“Some even objected to the delivery of mail.”) It’s a place where the social worker Pete Snow tries to help deeply troubled and abused children. One of them is Benjamin Pearl, a malnourished 11-year-old who lives off the grid with his anarchist father, Jeremiah. Pete’s own marriage is in shards; his wife leaves for Texas with their 13-year-old daughter, Rachel. When Rachel runs away from her mother, the novel charts her descent into a life of danger and Pete’s attempts to find her. The core of this sprawling debut is Pete’s relationship with the Pearls. The story of what happened to Jeremiah’s wife and other children is slowly unveiled, and devastating when it’s finished. First novels don’t come much more confidently written or fully imagined than this.

WYNNE’S WARBy Aaron Gwyn245 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $25.

Aaron Gwyn’s latest novel opens with a white-knuckle scene during a firefight in Iraq. When a horse wanders into the crossfire, the American soldier Elijah Russell instinctively runs out to save the animal. He and the horse very nearly die, and his daring rescue, captured by a BBC video crew across the street, becomes a viral sensation. Russell came by his deep knowledge of horses from his grandfather, a World War II hero who taught him that “what you couldn’t govern, you tried to identify before it broke you to pieces. There was a wildness in the world that couldn’t be governed at all.” His skills get him transferred to Afghanistan, where a mysterious Captain Wynne asks him to break horses for a covert operation. The book’s pacing is cinematic, and it echoes adrenalized silver-screen war stories like “Three Kings” and “The Hurt Locker,” as well as the gentler cross-species concerns of “The Horse Whisperer.”